Walking with the Wise #163: Healthy Fear

“Whoever walks in uprightness fears the LORD,
but he who is devious in his ways despises Him.”
—Proverbs 14:2

There are two great emotions that are great for motivation—love and fear. And the two are not mutually exclusive. There is the sense of fear being both bad and good. To have a healthy fear of something, say, electricity, is good. Any electrician will tell you that if one does not have a healthy fear of electricity, then he is taking his life in his hands. It is the fear of working with it that keeps him safe.

The same principle is true with God. Loving God means obeying Him, but it also means knowing that we are only men. As it says in Ecclesiastes,

“Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few”—Ecclesiastes 5:2.

Loving God also means fearing Him and understanding that He is God and we are not. We are simply stewards of this one precious life we’ve been given. And there will come a day when each of us must individually “give an account of himself to God”—Romans 14:12. None of us will escape, as we are reminded in the book of Hebrews:

“And no creature is hidden from His sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account”—Hebrews 4:13.

We have one life to live and we have the choice in this life to live for God or live for self. As C.S. Lewis once wrote,

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All who are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened”—C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce.

Those who love God will fear Him and want to do what He wants. But those who love evil more, who refuse to lay down the arms of their rebellion, who love sin more than the Savior and despise God’s discipline, will get what they want for eternity. The penalty for the sin they loved, and life away from the Savior, is eternal misery from that which is the truest source of joy.

We must be individuals who want God’s will above our own and, like our Lord, are crying out,

“Abba, Father, all things are possible for You. Remove this cup from Me. Yet not what I will, but what You will”—Mark 14:36.

Wanting God’s will above our own, we submit to His loving hand, knowing that we are stewards of all that we’ve been given. Let us agerly look forward to the day when He comes again, making sure that we are ordering our lives according to His Word, knowing that in doing so we have fullness of joy, both in this life and the one to come. Amen.